King Henry II Quotes

“Your little brother Philip is the King of France now and he wants your wedding dowry back. I only took you for your dowry. You were seven. [...] The Vexin is a little county but it’s vital to me.”

“Henry: Did the Channel part for you? Eleanor: It went flat when I told it to. I didn’t think to ask for more. How dear of you to let me out of jail.”

“I’ve snapped and plotted all my life. There’s no other way to be a king, alive and fifty all at the same time.”

“You get Alais and you get the kingdom but I get the one thing I want most. If you’re king, England stays intact. I get that. It’s all yours now-the girl, the crown, the whole black bloody business. Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s going to be a jungle of a day: if I start growling now. I’ll never last.”

“When I married Eleanor, I thought: ‘You lucky man. The richest woman in the world. She owns the Aquitaine, the greatest province on the Continent - and beautiful as well.‘”

“My position is - well frankly, Philip, it’s a tangle. Once I’m dead, who’s to be king? I could draw papers ‘til my scribes drop or the ink runs out, and once I died, unless I’ve left behind me three contented sons, my lands will split three ways in civil war.”

“For these ten years you’ve lived with everything I’ve lost and loved another woman through it all. And I’m cruel. I could peel you like a pear and God would call it justice ...”

“Well ‒ what shall we hang? The holly or each other?”